Do you find the Portal useful? We’re asking you to please take a minute today to keep our work going.
This year we added 1.2 million pages of material to the Portal and we need your investment to continue growing.
We’re only $100,000 away from meeting our year-end goals for the Challenge Grant we received from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
During our spring appeal, the average donor gave $30, but if even half the people who use the Portal this month give $5,
we’d meet our entire goal to raise matching funds for the endowment immediately.
The Portal connects people to the past, and your support will ensure its future.

a historian). One could also place this work in the more recent genre of bookson current-day immigration, which would include Peter Skerry's MexicanAmericans: The Ambivalent Minority (Free Press, 1993). If the reader is looking fora book that lays out the anti-immigration viewpoint for the 199os, this is proba-bly the book to read, but if the reader wants a book on the history of anti-immi-gration rhetoric in the twentieth century or a book that documents both sides ofthe argument equally, then I cannot recommend Reimers's book.University of Kansas VALERIE M. MENDOZALee and His Generals in War and Memory. By Gary W. Gallagher. (Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi+298. Illustrations, preface,credits, index. ISBN o-8071-2286-6. $27.95, cloth.)An explanation of an essay delivered in 1991 and subsequently published in acollection edited by Gabor S. Boritt the following year, this book is something ofa melange. The work is divided into four parts, but the first two, "Lee" and"Lee's Generals," take well over two-thirds of the space. The former is one moreeffort, in a growing number of current works, to reexamine Lee's generalship,while the latter does the same for a number of his commanders. The material isinteresting and, as one might expect from Professor Gallagher, well written.While it offers little that is altogether new to the historian, it is thoughtful anddeserves attention in that it reflects the musings of a close student of theConfederacy at war.The last two parts, "Fighting for Historical Memory" and "DistantReverberations," are a bit more in keeping with and something of a namesake toPaul Fussell's The Great War in Modern Memory. In "Fighting for HistoricalMemory," the first essay describes Jubal Early's untiring efforts following the warto preserve his commander's image as well as his ultimate success in turningRobert E. Lee into an American, and perhaps an international, icon. The nextessay reports on La Salle Corbell Pickett's attempt to recast her husband's per-sona through her questionable and rather clumsy editing of his letters."Reverberations" contains a balanced criticism of Ken Burns's enormously suc-cessful television series, "The Civil War," wherein Gallagher attempts to recon-cile the production's massive and euphemistic influence on the public percep-tion of the war with the strong and often adverse criticism that emanated fromboth academic and amateur historians. Finally, Gallagher looks at the role ofboth battlefield preservation and flags as symbols of the war's legacy.In sum, although the book has disparate segments, it is fascinating, informa-tive, thoughtful, and usually convincing. Its easy style should appeal to manyinterested in America's great nineteenth-century war. It is sure to be read by awide-ranging, appreciative audience.